Casper Smart (left) and Cedric Gardner with Ladera Ranch Dance in 2009. They were at Las Flores Middle School to teach students how dancing can keep them physically fit and healthy. MARK EADES, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

'A Step Away'

It's clear from any angle that Beau “Casper” Smart has it all going on right now.

There's the thriving career as a dancer, choreographer and creative director for music videos, TV commercials and concerts. A beautiful international superstar for a girlfriend – Jennifer Lopez, perhaps you've heard of her?

And starting this week, Smart will be seen on “A Step Away,” a reality series from NuvoTV that follows the dancers on J.Lo's most recent tour.

So, yeah, when the Orange County native flashes a big smile while talking about life, work and just a bit about love, it's easy to understand why.

But this certainly wasn't the life he expected. And to get here, Smart, 26, had to work hard and dance harder, but also get a little lucky and learn more than just a little humility.

To the public, Smart may still be known mostly as the guy J.Lo's been dating since she split with former husband Marc Anthony in 2011. That's just the surface, though. The deeper story about Smart and his journey into the spotlight begins in north Orange County with a scrawny kid who loved sports and didn't know a thing about dance growing up.

• • •

“I was into everything athletic,” Smart says of his passions as a young teen. “I played football. I ran track for a long time. I played basketball every day at home with my friends.”

He played saxophone – alto and tenor and baritone – and developed a sense of humor to protect him from daily trash can-stuffing by the bigger kids.

“I was funny, so I could get away with not being picked on,” says Smart, who considers Western High School in Anaheim his school, though he also attended Cypress and Tesoro high schools briefly. “Freshman year, I was 95 pounds and 4 feet 10 inches. So you can imagine what my football uniform looked like – my shoulder pads were bigger than my body!”

There really wasn't anyplace he would have seen dance, and so it wasn't until he was 18 and at a house party that he first saw guys doing a kind of dance that looked so different, so cool, that he had to know what it was.

They told him they were krumping, an offshoot of the hip-hop scene that features exaggerated, aggressive movements and a freestyle spirit. They also told him about “the sessions,” a weekly gathering in a Toys R Us parking lot in Santa Ana that started late at night and ran even later, a few hundred guys, loud music playing from a car trunk, and everyone taking a turn in the center to drop their best moves.

Nearly everyone who showed up was black, he says, and because he was often the only white kid in the crowd they called him Casper after the friendly ghost of comic book fame. “They made fun of me so much because I was so bad,” he says.

A year later, at a dance battle held at a Santa Ana church, he was finally ready. “Something clicked that made me say, ‘OK, I know what I'm doing,'” he says. “And when it was my turn to go, I annihilated him. From then on, it was battle after battle – I was crushing people – to where I was the best white krumper in the world.”

• • •

Of course, you can be the greatest krumper in the world and still not make a living at it. Smart still lived at home and worked as a waiter at Chili's, but now he felt like he'd found the start of a new path.

He won a contest held by choreographer Debbie Allen and took home $1,000. “When I saw the check, I went, ‘Mom, mom, I got a thousand dollars!'” he remembers. “It was the most money I'd ever seen, and at that moment I was like, ‘I need to do this.'”

He earned a spot with Tommy the Clown's crew (Tommy being one of the originators of krumping) and performed around the country and as far as Italy and New Zealand with them. After signing with a Los Angeles talent agency, he started booking jobs in music videos and commercials that needed freestylers, and eventually picked up more traditional dance techniques and the ability to learn choreography, too.

The arrogance and cockiness that had made Tommy the Clown initially leery to hire him sometimes turned off choreographers, but clients often noticed him for the swagger he possessed.

On a shoot for Eminem's “We Made You” video, he ended up volunteering to create a short choreographed section for one scene, and that opened the door to more choreography gigs.

At 22, he auditioned for Beyoncé and ended up launching a long-running working relationship with her creative director, Frank Gatson Jr. “He's a genius and he's my mentor,” Smart says of Gatson. “He knew I was a little crazy and a little loud. He was just, ‘Be cool.'”

Beyoncé liked his freestyle and hired him, and later Gatson started using him as an assistant choreographer on video shoots and TV show performances.

Outside of the dance studio and the soundstages, Gatson also is responsible for a landmark moment in Smart's life: By hiring him to help on the video for “On the Floor,” Gatson introduced Smart to the singer of that song, his future paramour, Jennifer Lopez.

• • •

The funny thing is, Smart didn't really want to be in the video, he says. Long hours, not the greatest pay, it was a hassle into which he was more or less tricked by Gatson and the video director, who wanted a nice bit of freestyling in the foreground of the dance club scene as the video begins.

But things can work out in unexpected ways. A few days later, he was asked to help choreograph a group of kids at a J.Lo appearance at The Grove shopping center in Los Angeles. Not long after that, as she was prepping for a performance on “American Idol,” she remembered him and asked her choreographer to bring Smart in for an audition.

As others had in the past, this choreographer was also reluctant to hire Smart because of his reputation: Great dancer but kind of a pain, Smart says of what he was told.

“I was like, ‘Yo, I'm not that person,'” Smart says. “‘I can be loud, I can be joking around, but I work hard.'”

From that, she had him dance stand-alone performances in different cities through much of 2011. A few months after she and Anthony had gone public with their split, Lopez and Smart started being seen together in public.

“We worked together and started getting closer,” he says. “We had a little bit of chemistry and we started dating.”

It's an understatement to say he wasn't prepared for the attention their romance would bring him.

Once in New York City, he says, he got lost looking for the barbershop where he'd made an appointment for a haircut. Standing outside the building where he thought it was, he walked up the steps, knocked on the door, rang the bell.

“Mind you, I have no idea I'm standing in front of a sex shop,” Smart says. The paparazzi got the shot and sold it to three different tabloids.

“The Star said I was upstairs in a gay club. In Touch's was that I was getting a happy-ending massage. And the other magazine had a different story in it. Three different stories on the same picture.”

A little over a year ago, Smart, Lopez and her manager, Benny Medina, started working on plans for what would become her Dance Again world tour. Smart served as supervising choreographer, and after the original creative director didn't work out, he added co-creative director to his duties.

Medina already had camera crews following Lopez for a movie about the tour, and after a short jaunt through South America, the idea for a reality show focused backstage and mostly on the dancers developed.

“A Step Away” is that show. It was developed independently through Lopez's Nuyorican production company, but NuvoTV, which brought in Lopez as chief creative officer a year or so ago, was always its likely home.

“I sat every single show behind the sound booth and wrote notes every single night for every single song,” Smart says of his work as co-creative director on the tour. “No one wants to hear it (after the show). It's late, they're tired. But until the show is perfect, it's got to be fixed, and the show's never perfect. There's always something to do.”

He says the TV show is something of which he and Lopez and her entire team are proud, and they hope fans embrace it as an entertaining behind-the-scenes look at the tour and its dancers.

As for his performance onstage during the tour? It's limited by all those other responsibilities he tended to.

“I dance hard in the show – for about 40 seconds,” he says, as he grins again. And why shouldn't he?

“My mom always asks me to this day, ‘Honey are you OK?' Are you happy?'” Smart says of his mother, Shawna LopazBregon, who lives in Mission Viejo with his stepfather and younger sisters. “Those are the two questions she always asks.”

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